Ten minutes later he felt his way back to the scooter, tapping twice on one of its planks to avoid getting his head bitten off by an all-too-ready Scarface. “So far, so good,” Locklear judged.
“This had better work,” Scarface muttered.
“Tell me about it,” said the retreating Locklear, grunting with a pair of stasis toroids. After the stasis units were all in place, Locklear rested at the scooter before creeping off again, this time with the glowlamp and a very sloppy wiring harness.
When he returned for the last time, he virtually fell onto the scooter. “It’s all there,” he said, exhausted, rubbing wrists still raw from his brief captivity. Scarface found his bearings again, but it was another hour before he floated up an arroyo and then used the lamp for a landing light.
He bore the sleeping Locklear into the cave as a man might carry a child. Soon they both were snoring, and Locklear did not hear the sound that terrified the distant villagers in late morning.
* * *
Locklear’s first hint that his plans were in shreds came with rough shaking by Scarface. “Wake up! The monkeys have declared war,” were the first words he understood.
As they lay at the main cave entrance, they could see sweeps of the pinnace as it moved over the kzin village. Small energy beams lanced down several times, at targets too widely spaced to be the huts. “They’re targeting whatever moves,” Locklear ranted, pounding a fist on hard turf. “And I’ll bet the priests are hiding!”
Scarface brought up his all-band set and let it scan. In moments, the voice of David Gomulka grated from the speaker. ” . . . Kill ’em all. Tell ’em, Locklear! And when they do let you go, you’d better be ready to talk; over.”
“I can talk to ’em any time I like, you know,” Locklear said to his friend. “The set they gave me may have a coded carrier wave.”
“We must stop this terror raid,” Scarface replied, “before they kill us all!”
Locklear stripped his sidearm magazine of its rounds and fingered the tiny ear set from its metal cage, screwing it into his ear. “Got me tied up,” he said, trying to ignore the disgusted look from Scarface at this unseemly lie. “Are you receiving . . .”
“We’ll home in on your signal,” Gomulka cut in.
Locklear quickly shoved the tiny set back into the butt of his sidearm. “No, you won’t,” he muttered to himself. Turning to Scarface: “We’ve got to transmit from another place, or they’ll triangulate on me.”
Racing to the scooter, they fled to the arroyo and skimmed the veldt to another spot. Then, still moving, Locklear used the tiny set again. “Gomulka, they’re moving me.”
The sergeant, furiously: “Where the fuck—?”
Locklear: “If you’re shooting, let the naked savages alone. The real tabbies are the ones with bandoliers, got it? Bag ’em if you can but the naked ones aren’t combatants.”
He put his little set away again but Scarface’s unit, on “receive only,” picked up the reply. “Your goddamn signal is shooting all over hell, Locklear. And whaddaya mean, not combatants? I’ve never had a chance to hunt tabbies like this. No little civilian shit is gonna tell us we can’t teach ’em what it’s like to be hunted! You got that, Locklear?”
They continued to monitor Gomulka, skating back near the cave until the scooter lay beneath spreading ferns. Fleeing into the safety of the cave, they agreed on a terrible necessity. “They intend to take ears and tails as trophies, or so they say,” Locklear admitted. “You must find the most peaceable of your tribe, Boots, and bring them to the cave. They’ll be cut down like so many vermin if you don’t.”
“No priests, and no acolytes,” Scarface snarled. “Say nothing about us but you may warn them that no priest will leave this cave alive! That much, my honor requires.”
“I understand,” said Boots, whirling down one of the tunnels.
“And you and I,” Scarface said to Locklear, “must lure that damned monkeyship away from this area. We cannot let them see kzinti streaming in here.”
In early afternoon, the scooter slid along rocky highlands before settling beneath a stone overhang. “The best cover for snipers on Kzersatz, Locklear. I kept my cache here, and I know every cranny and clearing. We just may trap that monkeyship, if I am clever enough at primitive skills.”
“You want to trap them here? Nothing simpler,” said Locklear, bringing out his tiny comm set.
But it was not to be so simple.
* * *
Locklear, lying in the open on his back with one hand under saffron vines, watched the pinnace thrum overhead. The clearing, ringed by tall fernpalms, was big enough for the Anthony Wayne, almost capacious for a pinnace. Locklear raised one hand in greeting as he counted four heads inside the canopy: Gomulka, Lee, Gazho, and Schmidt. Then he let his head fall back in pretended exhaustion, and waited.
In vain. The pinnace settled ten meters away, its engines still above idle, and the canopy levered up; but the deserter crew had beam rifles trained on the surrounding foliage and did not accept the bait. “They may be back soon,” Locklear shouted in Interworld. He could hear the faint savage ripping at vegetation nearby, and wondered if they heard it, too. “Hurry!”
“Tell us now, asshole,” Gomulka boomed, his voice coming both from the earpiece and the pinnace. “The secret, now, or we leave you for the tabbies!”
Locklear licked his lips, buying seconds. “It’s— It’s some kind of drive. The Outsiders built it here,” he groaned, wondering feverishly what the devil his tongue was leading him into. He noted that Gazho and Lee had turned toward him now, their eyes blazing with greed. Schmidt, however, was studying the tallest fernpalm, and suddenly fired a thin line of fire slashing into its top, which was already shuddering.
“Not good enough, Locklear,” Gomulka called. “We’ve got great drives already. Tell us where it is.”
“In a cavern. Other side of—valley,” Locklear said, taking his time. “Nobody has an—instantaneous drive but Outsiders,” he finished.
A whoop of delight, then, from Gomulka, one second before that fernpalm began to topple. Schmidt was already watching it, and screamed a warning in time for the pilot to see the slender forest giant begin its agonizingly slow fall. Gomulka hit the panic button.
Too late. The pinnace, darting forward with its canopy still up, rose to meet the spreading top of the tree Scarface had cut using claws and fangs alone. As the pinnace was borne to the ground, its canopy twisting off its hinges, the swish of foliage and squeal of metal filled the air. Locklear leaped aside, rolling away.
Among the yells of consternation, Gomulka’s was loudest. “Schmidt, you dumb fuck!”
“It was him,” Schmidt yelled, coming upright again to train his rifle on Locklear—who fired first. If that slug had hit squarely, Schmidt would have been dead meat, but its passage along Schmidt’s forearm left only a deep bloody crease.
Gomulka, every inch a warrior, let fly with his own sidearm though his nose was bleeding from the impact. But Locklear, now protected by another tree, returned the fire and saw a hole appear in the canopy next to the wide-staring eyes of Nathan Gazho.
When Scarface cut loose from thirty meters away, Gomulka made the right decision. Yelling commands, laying down a cover of fire first toward Locklear, then toward Scarface, he drove his team out of the immobile pinnace by sheer voice command while he peered past the armored lip of the cockpit.
Scarface’s call, in Kzin, probably could not be understood by the others, but Locklear could not have agreed more. “Fight, run, fight again,” came the snarling cry.
Five minutes later after racing downhill, Locklear dropped behind one end of a fallen log and grinned at Scarface, who lay at its other end. “Nice aim with that tree.”
“I despise chewing vegetable matter,” was the reply. “Do you think they can get that pinnace in operation again?”
“With safety interlocks? It won’t move at more than a crawl until somebody repairs the—” but Locklear fell silent at a sudden gesture.
From uphill, a stealthy movement as Gomulka scuttled behind a hillock. Then to their right, another brief rush by Schmidt, who held his rifle one-handed now. This advance, basic to any team using projectile weapons, would soon overrun their quarry. The big blond was in the act of dropping behind a fern when Scarface’s round caught him squarely in the breast, the rifle flying away, and Locklear saw answering fire send tendrils of smoke from his log. He was only a flicker behind Scarface, firing blindly to force enemy heads down, as they bolted downhill again in good cover.
Twice more, during the next hour, they opened up at long range to slow Gomulka’s team. At that range they had no success. Later, drawing nearer to the village, they lay behind stones at the lip of an arroyo. “With only three,” Scarface said with satisfaction. “They are advancing more slowly.”